Sinister

True-crime writer Ellison Oswalt, chasing a comeback after years of middling work, moves his wife Tracy and their two children, Trevor and Ashley, into a suburban Pennsylvania house without telling them it is the site of the family's murder — a previous family was hanged from the tree in the backyard, one child unaccounted for. The local sheriff makes his contempt for Ellison's methods clear from the first day. While exploring the attic, Ellison finds a cardboard box of Super 8 reels and a projector. The reel labels are innocuous — Pool Party '66, Barbecue '79 — but when threaded through the projector each one is a snuff film: a different family, killed in an elaborately staged way. One is hanged from a tree. One is drowned bound in a backyard pool. One is burned alive in a car. In every reel, one child from the family is absent from the dead and presumed taken.

Studying the footage, Ellison begins to notice a recurring figure in the margins of each film — a tall, pale-faced entity with dark hollow eyes, appearing in reflections, in shadows, in the backgrounds of what otherwise look like ordinary family moments. A university professor specializing in the occult identifies a symbol recurring near each kill site and connects it to an ancient pagan deity named Bughuul, the Eater of Children, a figure said to inhabit images and use them to corrupt and lure children into his realm. The more Ellison watches and re-watches the films, drinking heavily and pulling away from his family, the more tightly the house seems to close around them. Trevor develops violent night terrors and sleepwalks into dangerous positions around the house, his body contorting in the dark. Ashley, quiet and artistic, starts drawing the murdered family she was never told about and refers to an imaginary friend named Stephanie — the missing girl from the previous massacre.

Further research reveals the pattern that will doom the Oswalts: each family in the films once lived in a house where a prior massacre occurred, then moved, and was subsequently slaughtered at their new address with one child disappearing into Bughuul's realm. The house is not the source of the curse. The curse follows the family when they leave. Ellison, terrified, burns the films and projector in the backyard and moves his family out — believing escape is still possible.